This article originally appeared in the Financial Post. Below is an excerpt from the article.
By Peter Menzies, February 4, 2025
If animal species were going extinct as quickly as Canadian independent internet providers are dying off, the government would have long ago declared a national emergency.
In recent years, small internet service providers (ISPs) have either been gobbled up by their larger competitors or have kicked the bucket, joined the ISP industrial choir invisible and ceased to be. Paul Andersen, head of the Competitive Network Operators of Canada (CNOC), told a regulatory hearing a year ago that independent operators have “lost nearly 40 per cent of subscribers nationally and almost half in Ontario and Quebec since late 2020.” CNOC has only 15 members now, down from 31 just over three years ago and this week, when the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission’s (CRTC) posts its latest decision in what has become a song that never ends, we’ll find out if more will be pushed out.
For the better part of two decades, the CRTC has been held hostage by the issue of whether and how to mandate competitors’ access to networks other companies have built, and at what price. In trying to advance “third-party internet access” it has: set interim wholesale access rates, had them appealed, tried to correct them, been forced to retreat, decided to reconsider, been told by cabinet to take another look and set rules for some regions of the country that don’t apply to others (but could in the future).
Libertarians and others argue this is fine: companies that invest in infrastructure by digging the ditches and stringing the poles that get fibre lines to the doors of the nation’s data-hungry consumers shouldn’t have to share their infrastructure if they don’t want to (and they don’t). It’s a fine free-market argument until you remember that Canada’s telecom and internet market isn’t a free market. Rather, it’s a protected market within which regulatory bargains are constantly made.
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Jack Mintz is the President’s Fellow at the University of Calgary’s school of public policy and a distinguished fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
